Among the many reasons Professor Anelise Hanson Shrout (Digital and Computational Studies) was recently awarded this year’s Donald Harward Faculty Award for Service-Learning Excellence by Maine Campus Compact is her enthusiasm and creativity in helping her students engage creatively with the past. As a digital historian, professor Shrout’s courses focus on how digital technology can build and strengthen civic identities and relationships, giving students tools for collaborating with others to solve real-world problems and advance social justice. Whether developing tutorials to help survivors of domestic violence hide their online footprints, using data analysis methods to illuminate the relationship between Bates College, Lewiston’s mills, and the U.S. slave economy, or producing digital archives of a local museum’s Indigenous collections, students in her classes become citizen problem-solvers who work with each other and with members of the off-campus community to implement technological design processes that meet local needs. 

Among the more than two dozen community-engaged learning courses offered by Bates faculty members this past spring, one was professor Shrout’s “Public History in the Digital Age,” where students not only learned about public history but became public historians themselves, conducting archival research and using digital tools to tell the stories of some of those buried in Lewiston’s Riverside Cemetery. Visitors to the cemetery, which is situated along a popular walking path on the banks of the Androscoggin River, can now use their phones to listen to the stories of some of the Civil War veterans, immigrants, and Maine industrial workers buried there. Learn more by enjoying Freddie Wright’s wonderful article in the recent Bates News.